Saturday, 28 April 2012

This
struck me. I immediately applied this to every thinker I dislike.
Typing it out, I realised he was talking about me.

“Much
greater is the evil which lies in the pompous retinue of technical
terms – scientific expressions and metaphors, which these systems
carry in their train, and which like a rabble – like the baggage of
an army broken away from it's chief – hang about in all directions.
Any critic who has not adopted a system, either because he has not
found one to please him, or because he has not yet been able to make
himself master of one, will at least occasionally make use of one, as
one would use a ruler, to show the blunders committed by a general.

The
most of them are incapable of reasoning without using as a help here
and there some shreds of scientific military theory. The smallest of
these fragments, consisting in mere scientific words and metaphors,
are often nothing more than ornamental flourishes of critical
narration.

Now
it is the nature of things that all technical and scientific
expressions which belong to a system lose their property, if they
ever had any, as soon as they are distorted, and used as general
axioms, or as small crystalline talismans, which have more power of
demonstration than simple speech.

Thus
it has come to pass that our theoretical and critical books, instead
of being straightforward, intelligible dissertations, in which the
author always knows at leas what he says and the reader what he
reads, are brimful of these technical terms, which form dark points
of interference where author and reader part company.

But
frequently they are something worse, being nothing but hollow shells
without any kernel. The author himself has no clear perception of
what he means, contents himself with vague ideas, which if expressed
in plain language would be unsatisfactory even to himself.”

Friday, 27 April 2012

A few weeks ago some friends and I were hanging around waiting to play Microscope. We spotted some 40K products in the corner and, driven by my buried adolescent self, I went to have a look.

The most important thing I discovered is that almost every language in the world describes the agents of the dark Future where there are No Hugs better than English. Each box of deathtoys has a translation of the contents in several languages and every single language in the world sounds cooler than mine.

It's payday and I just picked up the latest issue of White Dwarf, which is now a slightly dull corporatised magazine with nice photos. But there is still gold in the margins if you look for it.

Sunday, 15 April 2012

I don't know if my memory has always been poor but the everyday things sleet through my hand like old snow. Perhaps because of this, I have an obsession with memory and with the history of thinking about memory.

Thursday, 5 April 2012

Playing Ghost/Echo I gave players ten syllables each to equip their characters.

So you can have a sword – 1 syllable, or a Kendachi Monoblade – 6 syllables.

For D&D type games this could be linked to Charisma, with each point giving you another syllable of description. This is in the long tradition of making-charisma-useful.

Would probably work better with story-games and/or chilled out players. Though if combined with a LOTFP simple encumbrance rule and with banning magical items I think it could function quite well.

I'm pretty sure I half-stole this idea from someone in the OSR, it's a bit like Zack S's syllables-for-price idea. Or someone trading character points for syllables of description during char-gen. Anyway, if its you I stole it from, sorry.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.